Woman returns 8 years after shock deportation

Published: 03 Mar 2013 15:57 GMT+01:00

A Kurdish woman whose deportation to Turkey in 2005 was denounced by many as inhumane returned to Germany on Sunday to be reunited with her husband and two daughters, whom she had not seen for eight years.

Gazale Salame was arrested without warning at her home in Hildesheim in Lower Saxony in February 2005 while her husband was out taking their daughters to school, wrote ZEIT ONLINE on Sunday.

Authorities said Salame's parents, refugees from war-torn Lebanon in the 1980s, had lied on their forms about her country of origin when they arrived in Germany 17 years earlier. Her parents had come to Germany through Turkey and had possessed Turkish passports, they said, making Salame, a child at the time, not a stateless Kurd from Lebanon, but a Turk.

Despite having lived in Germany 17 years and not speaking a word of Turkish, the then pregnant Salame was deported immediately to Turkey together with her one-year-old daughter, leaving behind her husband Ahmed Siala and their two elder daughters.

The authorities' decision, which prompted widespread indignation at the time, was denounced by many as inhumane.

Since that day, Siala has been fighting for the return of his wife, who suffered from depression while living in a rundown quarter of the west Turkish town of Izmir with her youngest daughter Schams and son Gazi, who was born in Turkey.

Siala was told she could come back if he applied for a residency permit for her, but his application was turned down and he was even threatened with deportation himself.

After a long and hard appeal process and repeated demonstrations against the decision, the Lower Saxony's state parliament finally granted Salame passage back to Germany last December.

She was greeted at Hannover airport on Sunday by Lower Saxony's new Social Democrat Interior Minister Boris Pistorius and representatives of refugee organizations.

Her husband and two elder daughters were also there to greet her, whom she had not seen since 2005.

Yes, it would have been very painful to be a separated family all of these years. That said - why did her husband and her elder daughters not go to Turkey to visit during that time? And why couldn't she and the two younger children not go to Germany to visit? Visits aren't forbidden, or am I missing something? And if they were forbidden, why didn't they meet somewhere else, like another country? They all could have met up in Hungary or Bulgaria or something, right? Eight years to keep your own family apart seems ridiculous to me.

SusannahM Good questions! they have answers, not all your "easy" standards apply to our "third" worls populations! I will not explain it to you, just "consider" the possiblity that some people live in different conditions and apply to them DIFFERENT rules from your country, than the ones apply to you!

@ Stop saying "third world" is about more than 9/10 of the World Population, and "first world" countries are destroying the environemment and poisoning the 9/10 rest of the population of this planet with OGM, industry and so on ...

People who should be forbidden of visa is those 1/10 of the global population that consumes 80 per cent of ressources and produce 85 percent of global CONTAMINATION ...

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